Possibly it was a practical commemoration of the art of determining longitude. On this hypothesis the new cubit was made as much longer than the old cubit as the mean degree of latitude is longer than the degree of longitude in 29° N., at an observatory about 50 meridian miles south of the Pyramids. In that parallel, the proportion of the degree of longitude to the degree of latitude is 1 : 1·13, or as 18·24 to 20·64. Measurements of monuments, both in Egypt and in the Babylonian and Assyrian Kingdoms, show that 20·64 inches was the length of the royal cubit, and actual cubit measures now extant do not vary from it more than one-or two-hundredths of an inch. There are at least ten of these cubits in museums and in other collections. One, a double cubit, is in the British Museum; another, very perfect, is in the Louvre; another, of rough graduation, but accurate length, is in the Liverpool Museum. There may be others, generally unknown. I found one, apparently unrecorded, in the museum of Avignon. As the Pyramids are very nearly in the same parallel of latitude as the southern limits of Babylonia, near Ur of the Chaldees, it is possible that the length of the royal or sacred cubit may have been as acceptable to the priesthood of Babylonia as that of Egypt. This would account for the prevalence of the seven-palm cubit throughout the Eastern great monarchies. Perhaps the new cubit may have been instituted internationally between the Bureau des Longitudes of Egypt and that of Babylonia. As in the case of the common cubit, two-thirds of the royal cubit were taken for the royal foot = 13·76 inches, a measure which when cubed will be seen to be the source of our Imperial system of weights and measures. The inconvenience of a cubit of 7 palms is increased when two-thirds of it are taken for the foot; this foot, being 4-2/3 palms or 18-2/3 digits, was possibly divided for popular use into 16 digits, if it were ever in popular use. For scientific and probably for popular use it appears to have been divided into 2 feet = 10·32 inches. This may be inferred from the division of the degrees, attributed to Eratosthenes (third century B.C.), into 700 stadia, each 600 of these feet. Probably 700 is a round number, for, on the basis of this foot, the degree would be 706·8 stadia. Three centuries later Pliny gave the base of the Great Pyramid a length of 883 feet. The modern measurement being 760 feet = 9120 inches, we have 9120/883 = 10·328 as the length of the foot in Pliny’s account, a length differing by less than 1/100 inch from that of the half-cubit.